Lytro Light Field Camera

via cult of mac
“This is the Lytro, a bizarre and radical new concept in digital photography that lets you snap an image now, and worry about focusing it later. Pre-orders just opened today, and you can grab one for as little as $399. But before you click the order button, make sure you have a Mac – because Lytro doesn’t work with Windows computers yet.

How does the Lytro work? The official description sounds like something from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field…”

Read the rest here, and more on the Lytro here, here, and here.

Take a line for a walk

via communication arts
“Cengage Learning promotes exercise for the creative muscles with Take a line for a walk. Authored by Robin Landa and designed by Seattle’s Modern Dog Design Co., the journal is comprised of mostly blank pages coupled with varied prompts that cue people to respond to whatever creative action—sketch, design, conceive, write—is called for. The author collaborated with designers, artists, architects, and experts in a variety of disciplines to vary the exercises in order to address numerous ways of thinking and creating and to entice all types of students, visual arts (and non-art majors) to think creatively.”
Details can be found here.

Image of the Day: Circular Pool

At Fisherman’s Paradise

Jae Rhim Lee: The Infinity Burial Project

via TED Talks
“Here's a powerful provocation from artist Jae Rhim Lee. Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner, greener Earth, even after death? Naturally—using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms…”
Watch her talk here.  

The Infinity Burial Project can be found here, and the blog here.

Image of the Day: Rusted Gate

Psychologists Chase Down Sleep Demons

The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli

via Penn State Daily Newswire
“What do Moby Dick, the Salem witch trials and alien abductions all have in common? They all circle back to sleep paralysis. Less than 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in two groups -- students and psychiatric patients -- according to a new study by psychologists at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania. Sleep paralysis is defined as "a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact," the researchers state in the current issue of Sleep Medicine Reviews. Hallucinations may also be present in these transitions to or from sleep...”
Read the full story on Live.

Image of the Day: Autumnal Pool

Image of the Day: Do Not Block

I found it humorous that this sign was blocked by another gate.

Wait. What Was the Question? A Series of Questions for Christopher Simmons

via neenahpaperblog
“The time I take to answer this question I'll never get back . . . Everything we do — create, love, mourn, worry, work, play, and so on — draws from a pool of nanoseconds into which no tributary flows. We can give away our time however we choose — just remember that you're not going to get any of it back.”
— Christopher Simmons


For the next 12 weeks Stefan G. Bucher  chooses questions
from his new book, 344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself-Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment and asks some seriously smart and capable men and women for their answers.

Read the interview here, find 344 Questions here.

John Hilgart: 4 Color Process

Word Processor

via how
“John Hilgart is obsessed with vintage comic books and has several interesting image collections including 4CP, which features close-ups of vintage printing, Comic Book Cartography, a collection of maps and diagrams, and Super Type!, which features comic book mastheads with amazing typography…”
Visit 4CP here.

Irony & Sarcasm Marks, Part 3

via shady characters
“Ironics notwithstanding, the irony mark lay dormant for much of the latter part of the 20th century. As had been the case with many other previously obscure marks of punctuation, however, the click-to-publish ease of the web well and truly rescusitated its fortunes: more new irony marks appeared in the decade from 2001 to 2010 than in any period before. Ironically enough, the first digital irony mark was not intended to punctuate irony in a general sense but instead its laser-guided offspring, sarcasm…”
Read the rest here.

Julian Bialowas: Visual Thinking

via how
“Looking for some visual and mental inspiration? Check out 365Q from Canadian photographer and designer Julian Bialowas, who paired an inspirational quote with one of her images every day for a year...”

Ganesh: A Holy Holiday Leaves a Mess

via npr
“Ganesh is a Hindu festival that takes place at the end of each summer, particularly in Mumbai. Traditionally, clay statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of beginnings and remover of obstacles, are placed in homes and worshiped for the duration of the 10-day festival. At the end, the statues are immersed in water (such as a river) and left to float away. The festival has modest origins. First organized in the 1890s, the idea was to invoke Hindu symbolism to foster a sense of nationalism in India's struggle for independence from Britain…”
Read the rest, and see more images, here.

Image of the Day: The Greek

Spotted in State College, PA

Bookbinding Cigarette Trade Cards

via letterology
From a set of British cigarette trade cards (circa 1922-1939) on mending old books from the George Arents collection at the New York Public Library.
See others in the series here.

Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet

via wired
“One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS. But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer…”
Read the rest here.

Image of the Day: No Dumping

Taken near Baltimore’s Riverside Park

PA Pixelworkers

via United Pixelworkers
Great shirts from Full Stop, a web design shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Here’s Pennsylvania’s!

Atomix

via liquid treat
“Atomix is an artful plaything designed in 1966 by Francois Dallegret and recently reintroduced to the market by New York-based Areaware. Sandwiched between five-inch squares of clear acrylic are 6,000 stainless steel balls that form an infinite number of fractal patterns when shaken, tilted or rotated. Originally created to help physics students visualize atomic structures, Atomix is just the thing to smarten up your desk…”
Visit Areaware here.

Confusing (and Frequently Misused) Type Terminology, Part 1

via fonts.com
“In the world of type and design, several typographic terms are either commonly confused with other terms, or are simply misunderstood in their own right. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we will shed light on three pairs of words that are widely misused. The words in each pair are related, but they refer to different things - and they are not interchangeable…”

Font vs. Typeface
Character vs. Glyph
Legibility vs. Readability

Read the rest here.